The property of a video sequence of the extensible format is to be able, from a single bit stream, to extract and decode videos according to different characteristics in terms of quality, time frequency and/or image size.
The future SVC standard (Scalable Video Coding) describes the process of coding video sequences in order to represent them in a scalable format. In practice, the SVC standard has been developed by the JVT (Joint Video Team) group, which brings together the experts in video compression from the MPEG (Moving Picture Expert Group) of the ISO/IEC and the video experts from the ITU, the International Telecommunications Union. This future SVC standard is an amendment to the video compression standard H.264 intended to offer more extensibility, or “scalability”, to the digital images of a video sequence.
More precisely, the SVC standard provides a compressed representation for supporting extensibility (scalability) along three different axes: temporal scalability, spatial scalability, and quality scalability.
In practice, the new SVC video format makes it possible to be decoded in a different manner according to the capacities and possibilities of the decoder and the characteristics of the network. Thus, from a video of average resolution (for example, with a resolution of 704×576 pixels, at a frequency of 60 Hz), it is possible to decode a bit stream corresponding to that of a mobile telephone (for example, with a resolution of 176×144 pixels, at a frequency of 15 Hz). Likewise, from an image with a given size and a given time frequency, it is possible to decode a video sequence by selecting the required quality according to the capacity of the network.
At the present time, the property of scalability of a video format is a property which is more and more important and extensive in the field of the processing of images in a video sequence.
However, the current methods for image processing use techniques which have the drawback of consuming processing time on the one hand and/or memory size on the other hand.